Sunday, April 21, 2013

A security officer patrolling the area outside the Watts Bar nuclear power plant in Spring City exchanged gunfire with an individual early this morning, according to a release from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The incident occurred more than a quarter mile from the plant’s protected area near the Tennessee River just before 2 a.m. Sunday.

The plant is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which notified the NRC of the incident. As a result, the Watts Bar plant staff declared an unusual event, the lowest of the NRC’s four emergency classifications.

The new strain of bird flu that has killed 17 people in China has been circulating widely "under the radar" and has acquired significant genetic diversity that makes it more of a threat, scientists said on Friday.

Dutch and Chinese researchers who analyzed genetic data from seven samples of the new H7N9 strain say it has already acquired similar levels of genetic diversity as much larger outbreaks of other H7 strains of flu seen previously in birds.

"The diversity we see in these first few samples from China is as great as the diversity we have seen with a large outbreak in the Netherlands several years ago and one in Italy," said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who worked on the study as part of a nine-member team.

"This means it (the H7N9 strain in China) has been spreading quite a bit and it's important to understand where exactly that is going on."

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope have found the best candidates yet for habitable worlds beyond the solar system, including a pair of potentially life-friendly planets orbiting the same star, officials said on Thursday.

The planets join a list of about 700 confirmed extra-solar planets discovered since 1995.

The new additions include a pair of planets orbiting a star called Kepler-62, located about 1,200 light years away in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-62's two outermost planets, both about 1.5 times the size of Earth, are located the right distance from their parent star for water - if any exists - to be liquid on the surface. Water is believed to be necessary for life.

Syrian forces and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed at least 85 people when they stormed a Damascus suburb after five days of fighting, opposition activists in the area said on Sunday.

There was no immediate confirmation of the activists' account of what they described as a "massacre", including of women and children, at Jdeidet al-Fadel. Syrian authorities have banned most independent media since the uprising began in 2011.

Texas officials released the names of four volunteer firefighters on Sunday killed in a deadly blast in this close-knit Texas town, as authorities identified the center but not the cause of last week's deadly fertilizer plant blast.

Among the dead named at a news conference outside city hall in West, Texas, were brothers Doug and Robert Snokhous, remembered by their family as "lifelong best friends" who lived half a mile from each other and worked together at an ironworks in nearby Waco.

"Doug and Robert could always be seen together, whether they were hunting, working on cars, golfing or cooking barbecue at the volunteer fire departments cook-off," their family said in a statement read to reporters.

Terrorism. Chaos. Fear of the future. In the age of Obama, America is undergoing a “fundamental transformation” – that much everyone knows.

But what few seem to realize about this transformation is that the sheer stress of living in today’s America is driving tens of millions to the point of illness, depression and self-destruction. Consider the following trends:

Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death for Americans. Even more disturbing, in the world’s greatest military, more U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat;

Fully one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all “millennials” (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.

Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five of all high-school-aged children in the United States has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens – children aged six to 12 – have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder...

Cyberbullying among teens has shot up in frequency in recent years,
from affecting just 6 percent of kids in 2000 to 85 percent today, polls
show.

Among those in the 85 percent is Audrie Pott, a 15-year-old girl from
Saratoga who hanged herself in September after a cell phone picture of
her, unconscious after an alleged sexual assault, was circulated around
her high school via texts and in person. Three 16-year-old boys were
arrested last week in connection with her death.

Cell phones, in teens’ hands, make the kids more likely to bully
others electronically, experts say. Helping drive this phenomenon is a
sense of callousness from communicating electronically and the growth of
a documentation mentality, detailed here.

As many as 74 schoolgirls in Afghanistan's far north fell sick after smelling gas and were being examined for possible poisoning, local officials said on Sunday.

While instances of poisoning are sometimes later found to be false alarms, there have been numerous substantiated cases of mass poisonings of schoolgirls by elements of Afghanistan's ultra-conservative society that are opposed to female education.

Local officials said the girls became ill after smelling gas at their school, Bibi Maryam, in Takhar province's capital, Taluqan. The city is about 250 kilometers north of the country's capital, Kabul.

The Takhar governor's spokesman, Sulaiman Moradi, blamed "enemies of the government and the country" for the mass illness and said the aim was to stop girls from going to school.

A mild form of bird flu has broken out in Lower Saxony. Avian influenza virus subtype H7 has been detected in 2 turkey farms in the district of Osnaburg. This was confirmed by the Ministry of Agriculture on Thu 18 Apr 2013. All 27 000 turkeys in these f arms must now be culled. There should not be human health risk by this mild form of avian flu.

Igor Luksic, leader of the Social Democrats in Slovenia's ruling coalition, disagrees with the European leaders who say his country should privatize its three biggest lenders to avoid the misery of another bailout in the euro zone.

The political science lecturer who has lined his office with portraits of Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara said his party would fight the move.

"We have always been against selling banks," said Luksic, whose party is the second largest in Prime Minister Alenka Bratusek's government.

The euro zone's top project to boost economic growth - banking union - will not be delayed for now by a row over whether it needs EU law changed because most of the work can be done before this is settled, a senior euro zone official said on Saturday.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who chairs the monthly meetings of his euro zone colleagues, said the dispute on the legal requirements of the banking union can go in parallel with more technical work on how it would function.

"I am, in a sense, relaxed about it, because I know that we can push forward at least 80-90 pct of the project," Dijsselbloem told a news conference on the sidelines of the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund.

The leader of Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, on Sunday criticized the re-election of President Giorgio Napolitano as a desperate attempt to retain power by a discredited establishment.

The euro zone's third largest economy is still without a government two months after a general election, has scarcely grown in 20 years and is grappling with the highest level of unemployment in decades.

Talks on the formation of a new administration are expected to resume in the coming week, with the parties under pressure from Napolitano to reach a deal.

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has not be read his Miranda rights – but a battle is being waged whether he should.
Four prominent Republican Congressmen have argued that the 19-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen should be treated as an ‘enemy combatant,’ meaning that he would not be Mirandized.

Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, as well as Rep. Peter King, New York, said in a joint statement they ‘do not want this suspect to remain silent.’

In a statement obtained by the Washington Post, the four Republican lawmakers wrote: ‘The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans.’

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Sunday a $10 billion arms deal under discussion with Washington's Arab and Israeli allies sent a "very clear signal" to Tehran the military option remains on the table over its nuclear program.

"The bottom line is that Iran is a threat, a real threat," said Hagel, who arrived in Israel on Sunday on his first visit to Israel as defense secretary.

The Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research in Dhaka has reported the seventh case of human infection of H5N1 avian influenza, according to a IEDCR release.

According to Bangladeshi health authorities, the victim was a 1 year 11 months old male child from Chauddogram, Comilla. He was admitted to Comilla Medical College Hospital, later transferred to Dhaka Shishu Hospital and then to a private clinic. He died on 18th February, 2013. This is the first death case of H5N1 in Bangladesh.

The H5N1 avian influenza was laboratory confirmed by the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, a WHO reference laboratory.

About 30‚000 fowls of the 70‚000 birds have died of virus • Rapid response team swings into action to curb spread

The highly pathogenic avian flu (H1N1) virus has been detected at one of the biggest poultry farms in Chitwan in a recent case of bird flu outbreak. Authorities have confirmed the disease at Laxmi Rana’s poultry farm in Godrang of Bharatpur.

The confirmation came after the outbreak claimed about 30,000 of the total 70,000 fowls at the farm.

After the Central Veterinary Laboratory confirmed the disease, a rapid response team from the district livestock office of Chitwan and the National Bird Disease Research Laboratory reached the farm and started its operation from Friday night itself.

According to the sources, till Saturday afternoon, the team has culled 11,289 fowls at the three-storey farm building. They will start culling the remaining fowls in the two other floors of the building from Saturday evening and the farm will be cleaned by Sunday.

Heavy rains and flooding have led two cottage country communities in central Ontario to declare a state of emergency.

In the town of Huntsville, a three and a half metre sinkhole has opened up on Hwy. 11 after 50 mm of rainfall in the last 24 hours. Extreme weather has also led to “massive” destruction of municipal infrastructure.

“All resources have been deployed and we continue to monitor the situation,” Kelly Pender, the town’s chief administrative officer said in a news release on Friday.

According to officials, water levels continue to rise in flood-prone areas, including downtown Huntsville and the Big East River flood zone. The water is expected to rise over the next 24 hours.

Syrian opposition figures voiced frustration with their international backers on Saturday in the face of reluctance from some to supply the rebels with weapons and a call for them to distance themselves from extremist forces.

North Korea has moved two more missile launchers to its east coast, where preparations are apparently under way for a missile test as tensions simmer on the peninsula, a report said.

Expectations had been high that Pyongyang would carry out a test to coincide with celebrations marking the birth of North Korea's late founding leader Kim Il-Sung on April 15 but it did not materialise.

The North Korean military last week moved two launchers believed to be for Scud missiles to the northeast province of South Hamgyong, Yonhap news agency said, citing a senior Seoul official.

"We have discovered the North has moved two additional TELs (transporter erector launchers) to the east coast... after April 16," the official was quoted as saying, adding Seoul and Washington were closely monitoring the site.

A spokesman for Seoul's defence ministry was not immediately available to confirm the report.

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI agents were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

A victim of the Boston bombings Monday with some of the most graphic wounds caught on photograph reportedly woke up in a drugged haze after surgery and in recovery, saw the FBI's pictures of the two suspects that had been released and said one of them "looked right at me."

An emergency responder and volunteers, including Carlos Arredondo in the cowboy hat, push Jeff Bauman in a wheel chair after he was injured in an explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday, April 15, 2013 in Boston.

This image was cropped due to its graphic nature. At least three people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy, and more than 170 were wounded when two bombs blew up seconds apart.

“A Palestinian released from Israeli jails, Rania Saqa, has brought to light that the Israeli regime injected detainees that are out of prisons with dangerous viruses,” Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote on Friday.

Saqa also said many of the prisoners are suffering from mysteriously incurable diseases such as bladder cancer and liver disorders.

She said it is a standard procedure for Israelis to inject Palestinian detainees before freeing them.

Late Friday, the FBI finally admitted that it had interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older Boston Marathon bombing suspect who was killed by police early Friday morning. The FBI reversed itself after the Tsarnaevs’ mother, Zubeidat, told Russia Today that her son had been monitored by the FBI on Skype, and actually spoke with him “every step of the way.” She said, “They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me ... they were telling me that he was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites... they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step...and now they say that this is a terrorist act!”